USING INTELLIGENCE WISELY

Questions are more important than answers.

Beyond shallow punditry and much mindless and forgettable creation and formatting of content (satirized recently here, also gently expressing rage at international norms being treated as a transactional game), AI is amazing.  I began a paid-up subscription in March 2025 and review some of the highlights to date for me in this post.

Let’s be clear: to make the most of AI, you need to ask good questions.  When you write the prompt, and when you look at the responses with a critical eye.  This is deceptively simple, but it means that those people who are curious, well-educated and undogmatic have a terrific advantage.  Like all tools, AI is double-edged and, like all technologies before, it has potential to both deepen inequalities and promote equality.   

In her recent book Outgrowing Modernity (incidentally I liked her earlier Hospicing Modernity a lot more), Vanessa Machado de Olivera writes how she has used AI as her “super-competent editorial assistant … which reduced [her] work hours from an exhausting sixty-five hours a week to a more manageable forty-five while doubling the outputs.”

In March 2025 I had a designer lined up to produce the logo for www.plenna.org; she pointed out that AI would be a lot cheaper but I wanted to support her as a local artist.  However, she pulled out at the last minute due to being overloaded with other work – so, without another option, I started subscribing to an AI system.  The price of that month’s subscription – and it designed the logo, albeit in a rather cumbersome way – was seventy-five times cheaper than her rate.

There are many ethical and copyright issues with AI, but as a poet with time on his hands in April I was nevertheless drawn to explore Suno and put much of my writing to music: for example my extended poem A Deluge of Wonders which is all about new technology and warns us of the

ultimate tool to bring us together, to break down boundaries

To seed cynicism, division, conspiracy theories and a more atomized society

To channel power and control

In undertaking a short consultancy in May I had a day free at the end of the contract and (AI synthesized the 12-page report I produced into this summary):

I used AI to support a structured analytical review of UNDP reporting to the UNAIDS Joint Programme Monitoring and Planning System (JPMS), covering the period 2018–2024.  The task was to identify trends, shifts in focus, and added value across global thematic reporting and selected country activity reports.

I first extracted and cleaned raw JPMS text data for global result areas and country-level activities.  Using AI as an analytical support tool, I then applied a series of structured prompts to: (1) synthesize multi-year thematic trends (e.g. key populations, legal environments, sustainability); (2) quantify and interpret geographic coverage through country-mention counts; and (3) conduct longitudinal analysis of three consistently reported countries (India, Kazakhstan, South Sudan), producing year-by-year summaries followed by cross-period syntheses.

AI outputs were iteratively refined, triangulated against original source text, and reviewed through an evaluation lens, focusing on coherence, plausibility, and contribution to results narratives.  This approach helped to accelerate sense-making across large qualitative datasets, undertaken trend analysis, and demonstrated how AI can complement evaluative judgement in performance assessment and learning – while retaining human oversight, validation, and accountability throughout the process.

In one day, I was able to do work which would have taken me weeks without AI support.  I designed the JPMS in 2012 – with the vision, and dream, that one day the accumulated data might provide a basis for analysis and research into the achievements and challenges of the UN system in its effort to respond to HIV and AIDS.  The capacity did not exist in the past: it is now a reality.

I revisited this while applying for a Senior Advisor post in MOPAN last month – for which a third of the job description is to “oversee MOPAN’s digital approach including AI”.  The inescapable conclusion seems to be that without an in-depth knowledge of how to use AI and its possibilities one will, for many jobs, become unemployable.

I have also recently used AI to set up weekly trackers of job announcements against five categories of employment.  There is still value in searching and verifying online but it helps reduce the slog and makes the approach a lot more systematic (although I maintain that having a network remains fundamental: six out of seven of the positions in the UN I had over the last twenty years relied principally on having the right contact at the right time, with only one position obtained through a full, year-long application process).

The development of my book, The Punctuation of Loss, has also benefitted from AI.  I began to conceptualize the idea in April as a PhD with the question, “Is death better considered as a full stop or a comma?”: asked to take a broad multidisciplinary perspective, AI suggested ten foundational texts to read, which were all excellent and well-selected.  I have not yet found a supervisor so used a three-month sabbatical break to write the book.  Old-school editors and publishers are wary of AI, but I would argue it can provide an added-value – as long as there is full transparency in how it is used.  Thus, in the book, I note early on:

All the tables, including those at the end of nine chapters which recapitulate the main messages ‘through a punctuation lens’, were developed by AI with only minor edits on my part.  The penultimate chapter, ‘The Punctuation Tapestry’ was also produced by AI.  However, the assemblage and overall interpretation within the book (and errors therein) is entirely my own, upon which AI synthesized.  This power is astonishing and improving, and I believe this represents a particular facility of AI to bring together and re-present data, finding and displaying patterns fast, rather than original thinking and conceptualization – not yet so much, although things are changing rapidly.  We cannot ignore the transformative power of AI in our lives and in presenting a hybrid of this in the book is an acknowledgement of this; I believe we stand more to gain than to lose.